So, quite a bit of people asked me what I’ll be doing now that I left Gentoo.
For sure, I won’t be bored. I have xine to work on (I’ve cleaned up some stuff in the past days already), I’ve Rust to complete, and a few Rust extensions to work on.
I have my job, that will take me more time now anyway because it’s coming to the end of the contract, so I was already planning into going in away from Gentoo for the time needed to complete the job.
I have the SPARC64 problem to debug, now that I put the Intel card in it the network performance is decent and I can probably start looking more into kgdb.
Today I also got something new to work on: not sure if I blogged about this before, but last month I ordered four USB to serial converters from eBay from an Hong Kong shop, they were cheap and I needed quite a bit of them, and I received them today. I hoped they were PL2303 based as they seemed identical to a similar product in an Italian shop, in Photo. Unfortunately, they are not. The chip used is from a Chinese manufacturer WCH, I have some Windows drivers for it, but that’s it. I’ve sent a mail to the company, in hope they can provide me some specs about these, they already got spec of some of their chips on the site, although in Chinese; if they can provide me that, I’ll see to write a driver for these, as, well, I need them, and it seems to be an easy task to start looking at kernel’s internals, and I might buy a few more of these, because serial ports aren’t really that common nowadays, and they are quite needed when working with embedded stuff.
As I said there is a lot of things for me to do, and even if I still have to find anything about building model ships (that is something I’d like to do, I like the results, and it’s something that would take me enough time so that I can relax myself), I’ll probably try to find something to do away from the keyboard just to relax myself.
And maybe, now that stuff seems to have started moving, in two or three months I might consider coming back. Not now for sure, and not too soon, but if the currently problems will be sorted out, I might consider it for the future. In the mean time I’ll still be around anyway, as an user contributing patches when it seems fit.
Update (2017-04-29): Looks like WCH is gone. On the other hand, someone else already contributed a ch314 driver, so I never actually implemented this myself.
Have you tried playing go? Seems to be quite relaxing although demanding. And it is something you can do your whole life.Have fun anyway!
Reverse engineering USB drivers is much simpler than reverse engineering any other driver, because the USB sniffing tools are very advanced and consist of a series of packets. Reverse engineering a USB serial adapter should be relatively trivial.
a good start of point can be to full file gentoo bugzilla with a lot of bugreports, so (some) people at gentoo maybe can understand better the meaning of “team cooperation” and how can be very hard to follow all the stupid bugzilla requests ^^
I’m sorry to hear what happened. I did read some of the threads and am glad you took a stand – sometimes bold moves are what it takes to get things corrected.Anyway, maybe you should consider joining FreeBSD? 🙂